It costs money to test, process, and arrange for distributing blood to hospitals. As far as I know, all blood collectors do charge a fee for the blood, but that is to help pay for the processing including the salaries and health insurance of the people who work for the blood collectors and processors.

The ban on MSM* donation in the United States comes from the FDA, and all US blood collectors must follow it. However, the organizations representing US blood collectors have been urging the FDA to change that policy for years. The previous administration was completely resistant; the current one is willing to reconsider. http://www.advocate.com/Health_and_Fitness/Health_and_Treatments/HIV/Blood,_Sex,_and_the_FDA/
If you disagree with the policy and are eligible to donate, I would urge you to write to the FDA commissioner and still consider donating.

In many areas, the Red Cross is not your local provider of blood. Put in your zip code at http://americasblood.org and it will let you know the closest center.

Dept of Defense also maintains their own blood supply system, although there is some crossover in that I am sure if they are ever low they would obtain it from civilian organizations.

Finally, if you wish to donate blood I would urge you to consider making appointments for next week or several weeks from now, as enough people have very likely already donated for the specific victims, and your community always needs steady donors. In both the 2005 London bombings and the aftermath of 9/11, the response was such an oversupply that many units of blood went unused before the expiration date.

*Men who have sex with men, not mainstream media.

The Muslim organisations condemned it because it was a high-profile act by a Muslim against the American state. I think they were right to do so, for the sake of the American Muslim population. I don’t believe they should every time a Muslim, or a Muslim group, does something bad which may or may not have been in the name of Islam. We shouldn’t rise to the “condemn it or else” threats because these things are never enough for a lot of people. I came out and said on my blog that western Muslims should not condemn the Bombay attacks last November because they had nothing to do with us and we should not satisfy the demands of people who regard Muslims as guilty until proven innocent. But this is entirely different, in my opinion.

Sure stalkers are creepy but I doubt they’re all mentally ill. (Hinckley was found to be not guilty by reason of insanity, so we’re going to assume he was.) They act out of a sense that they are entitled to not only women’s bodies and attention but to a specific woman’s body and attention and get really upset when ignored or thwarted. These are systemic issues — the same issues that seemed to have motivated George Sodini when he went hunting women last year.

The man who committed the mass shootings in Killeen in 91 lived on the same street I moved to 16 years later. It was chilling to think that he grew up there in a house just a few down from mine, developed his way of thinking there, and left from that house with his weapons to shoot dozens of people.

The immediate speculation about mental illness is part of a distancing act, too. Mentally ill? Not one of us. Of Jordanian descent? Not one of us. Soldier? Not one of us. That last may seem odd, but I think it’s true. In base towns, military members are a separate class, not necessarily marginalized, but separate. Sometimes they’re lauded and others avoided, depending on how the wind blows.

This, right here, folks.

Listening to the speculation about this has been really upsetting for me. Even news programs that I usually think of as fairly evenhanded are pulling stuff out of thin air and dwelling lasciviously over the tiny scraps of information they have been able to mine.

I also think it’s really sad that numerous Muslim organizations in the United States have felt obliged to rapidly come forward with condemnations stressing that this man acted independently (and actually against) Islam, and that they love America. It really upsets me that every time a crime is committed by a Muslim, there’s an expectation that all Muslim organizations should immediately rush to apologize/condemn, as should individual Muslims. As though the actions of one Muslim are the fault of the Muslim community as a whole. Yet, when crimes are committed by people of other religious denominations, there are no such expectations.

To be very clear: it makes no sense to speculate about Hasan’s motivations, and we’ve heard, for the past 16 hours, no shortage of wild speculation that stigmatizes a lot of people. Hasan is alive. He will be interrogated and tried. We will presumably learn soon why he committed the cowardly actions he committed. Until then, those who speculate only reveal their own prejudices.

i just wish there weren’t so many prejudices to be revealed.

The shooter was a psychiatrist for people at the base who were dealing with PTSD from their experiences as soldiers.

Someone pointed out (meaning it in quite a different way, I think) that these soldiers were probably verbalizing resentment against the people they viewed as their enemies — people the shooter identified with. (Which makes it sounds downright fucking reasonable, but again, they are using it as a dogwhistle.)

We are rushing to paint the shooter as mentally ill, because of course someone who commits crimes and violence must be mentally ill by default, and his victims as normal folks — when in fact it is the other way around: a person who was presumably “sane” killed people with mental illness.

Once again, the mentally ill population is no more likely to be violent than the sane population — but the mentally ill population is twice as likely to be victim to violence as the sane population.

And this reality is completely erased by our mainstream societal conception of crime and illness.

I know it’s comforting to convince ourselves that we are safe from ever committing monstrosities if we are normal, but our comfort erases the dangerous reality that non-normal people live in every day. And that is disgusting.